Discursive psychology is defined and illustrated in terms of how people describe and invoke emotions in everyday talk and text. Materials from counselling sessions and newspaper texts show how emotion descriptions are used in narrative accounts and explanations, both in building and in undermining the sensibility of a person’s actions. It is suggested that, rather than stemming from fixed cognitive scenarios that define what each emotion word means, emotion discourse deploys a flexible range of oppositions and contrasts that are put to service in the situated rhetoric of description and counter-description, narrative and counter-narrative. The rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors suggest a set of rhetorical affordances in which different parts or potentials of meaning, even contrasting ones for the same word, may be worked up and deployed. The article works with a tentative list of 10 rhetorical contrasts.

Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: (1) announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; (2) laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; (3) displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and (4) uses of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness.

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